


Angel of Death

by Prince_of_Elsinore



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Historical, Implied Sexual Content, M/M, Non-Graphic Violence, Poetry, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-28
Updated: 2013-06-28
Packaged: 2017-12-16 12:09:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/861872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prince_of_Elsinore/pseuds/Prince_of_Elsinore
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I despised your eyes, the color of their blood." A poem about the Battle for Crete in WWII. Greece defends his island and watches his enemy Prussia struggle to survive. 70 years later, things have changed a bit.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Angel of Death

**Author's Note:**

> This is just a very old poem I wrote about the Battle of Crete in WWII. Here's some information that might make it make more sense: in 1941 Germany invaded Greece, and the island of Crete was the last place the Greeks (and British Commonwealth troops) held out until the first full-scale airborne invasion in history, when the Luftwaffe's paratroopers, the elite of the Wehrmacht, were dropped on the island. After brutal fighting, they managed to take the island, but it was a rather Pyrrhic victory, as the paratroops were decimated and put out of commission for the rest of the war. So, Greece, the narrator, is defending his island, and Prussia is a paratrooper, since he wears a Luftwaffe uniform.
> 
> Maybe someday when I am not feeling lazy I will revise this (as I said it's an old work).
> 
> I don't own Hetalia.

_Angel of Death_

One day

You fell from the sky like an angel of death

Colors blossomed around you as you plummeted

Flowers, perfumed with poison, brought death where they withered on the grass.

My salt-stung eyes, hot with fury, gazed into the ruthless sun

And saw the silhouettes of floating spiders swarming over blue skies.

The drone of your plane was Death's song.

But when your closed feet met the unforgiving earth

And you tumbled in the crackling brush,

You were lucky.

You were not one of the marionettes,

Born on the wind by strings,

That crumpled in the dust, flimsy as a child's toy,

That met the gallows one hundred feet in the air

When my companions and I condemned them with the sentence of a salvaged rifle.

But your luck did not last

For you landed in Hell.

Your knife could not be quick enough to cut the cords

That had been salvation

But which now ensnared you, a helpless moth batting wings against the waiting widow's silken threads.

I punctured the sails of many of your comrades and they dropped like stones around you,

Broken bodies once beautiful that did not move from where they came to rest.

When you finally broke free all you could do was throw your body down

Beside the rosemary whose scent was overpowered with crimson iron,

And crawl to the olive grove, a mockery of peace

With limp dolls strung up from the branches

Like so many clusters of grapes,

Heavy and ripe,

Dripping thick juices from their perforations.

My children wielded sticks

They wielded pitchforks

They wielded their grandfather's guns from over the mantle of a home you would burn

In the ashes not a scrap of a mother's lace bridal veil could be found

Nor, more precious yet, a single morsel of bread to calm the cramps of starvation.

But for the moment you were prostrate behind a silver-leaved tree,

Desperately calling for your comrades.

And when a boy with hardly a hair on his chin charged you with a bayonet he'd picked from a corpse

Your reflexes paid and you shot him twice.

For good measure.

He fell beneath the branches he had climbed last year's harvest.

One of his neighbors had you in her sights.

You did not escape the hornet's sting that whistled toward you from her trigger

And pierced so close to the heart.

And yet when I found you leaking life into the thirsty ground,

Almost as parched as our throats,

I quelled the flow

And brought you among the stacks of bags,

Which were skins holding once-functioning organs and once holding souls.

There were your best,

Your blond Gods among men,

Your sons far from their homes.

There were my young,

My old,

My men,

My women,

My brothers and sisters,

My mothers and fathers,

My children.

I despised your eyes, the color of their blood,

And thought I should have let them fade, staring up at the indifferent sun.

 

But then…

I wouldn't be seeing them now

Gazing up at me

Almost as they did when I put the merciful needle in your pale skin to sow you like a seam.

They hold almost the same wonder

Almost the same confusion.

And our mingling breaths come almost as quickly as our panting in that searing heat

Almost the same desperation

Almost the same exhilaration.

And our groans are almost as loud as the miserable dying that surrounded us

Almost the same want

Almost the same need.

 

Almost.

But not quite.

**Author's Note:**

> About the somewhat cracky ending: I wanted it to be a comment on how nations move on from the past, as painful as the memories are. The battle happened 70 years ago but Greece and Prussia haven't forgotten. But they have forgiven. Relationships can change over time, especially when you're talking world politics. (I realize Greece and Prussia might not be on best terms right now due to the crisis, but I tend to think Greece has got more beef with Prussia's brother than with him, and Prussia figures it's his brother's problem.)


End file.
